


Paladins

by WhatOtherPlanet



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: But Gender Stuff still happening with Pidge, Exploration, Female pronouns for Pidge, Gen, Literal Exploration, Maybe some shipping later I dunno we'll see how it goes, No Planned Smut Sorry, Paladins of Voltron have to deal with Big Problems, Post-Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-03
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-19 10:10:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8201426
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhatOtherPlanet/pseuds/WhatOtherPlanet
Summary: Scattered by a corrupted wormhole, the Paladins of Voltron think long-term.





	

**** When Pidge woke up, she was hanging upside down in her flight harness.

She opened her eyes, squinting as her brain trudged its way to consciousness. The dim glow from her suit's built-in lights illuminated a darkened console. The lion's cockpit resolved as her eyes figured out the lighting.

The power in the Lion's cockpit was out. That, Pidge thought, was  _ bad. _

Now, Pidge was no Altean engineer, but she knew more about the lions than just about anyone else in the universe. She'd read every relevant text on the Castle's computers. She'd studied their workings, both outside and as far inside as she could get without tearing one of them apart. There were still hundreds of concepts and underlying principles she didn't understand, but one thing she'd figured out pretty quickly was that the Lions were more like living things than machines. That description cut out a lot of detail and nuance, but it helped illustrate one relevant fact:

The Lions didn't tend to get knocked out one system at a time. If the cockpit lights were out, and the cockpit  _ gravity  _ was out, it meant that the rest of the lion was out, too.

Pidge winced, twisting a little in the harness. "Damn."

Her arms were hanging above (below?) her head. She lifted them, and quickly found that something felt  _ wrong. _

Years ago, she'd been playing on the swingset out behind her house, hanging off the top bar by her knees and swinging back and forth. Her mother—a doctor—had told her that if she didn't come down the blood would rush to her head and hurt her brain.

And as much as that statement was probably just meant to scare a rowdy child off the swingset for awhile, present circumstance suggested there was something to the threat. Suspended upside down in the pilot's chair, Pidge was feeling distinctly lightheaded, and her feet were starting to go numb.

Once the buckle came free, she slipped out of the harness, swinging herself down to the ceiling.

Pins and needles shot through her legs as she stumbled to catch her balance. She sunk down instead, ending up sitting on the ceiling as the blood started moving back to where it was supposed to be in her body.

She made herself breathe. 

In, out. 

In… out… 

Focus, Pidge.

The last thing she remembered was the wormhole destabilizing. With that in mind, the present situation made perfect sense. In fact, it was almost a relief. She still  _ existed,  _ and the fact that there was a stable source of gravity suggested she'd landed on a planet.

Or she was on a Galra ship. That was possible too.

Still, it struck her as unlikely that the Galra had picked her up. She didn't know how long she'd been out, but it wasn't long enough to have been hungry. The odds that the Galra had already found her after a trip through an unstable wormhole were pretty damn low.

She shook her head, trying to kickstart her brain. Assuming that Altean "wormholes" actually were some kind of Einstein-Rosen bridge, she could have traveled to any point in space  _ and  _ time. For once, Pidge hoped these things  _ didn't  _ operate on regular physics, but it was something worth considering. She'd never heard Coran or Allura mention the possibility of time travel, and while it was, again,  _ possible  _ that it was just so pedestrian they hadn't thought it pertinent, the sheer effect such technology would have on the structure of society and the waging of war just didn't seem present. Ergo, Alteans probably couldn't time travel, and Galra probably couldn't either.  _ Ergo, _ Pidge was still in relatively the same time-space as the rest of Team Voltron, even if not in the same space… space.

Sitting on the ceiling, Pidge turned on her suit microphone.

"Guys?" she said. "Anybody out there?"

She waited. The silence dropped again, colored only by the faint buzz coming from the open channel. Ten seconds. Twenty. There had been times when the comms hadn't worked. They weren't common.

Alone on an alien world. Her lion inactive. Pidge hugged her knees to her chest, rubbing through the thinner bits of the suit to get the circulation going again. How long would it take to fix the lion?  _ Could  _ she fix the lion? For all she knew, the head was all that was left--

_ "Sweet quiznak, Pidge! I hear you!" _

Pidge sputtered something, half a scream and half a laugh. "Hunk!"

_ "Oh hell YES! It is  _ so  _ good to hear your voice right now." _

Pidge staggered to her feet, almost running to the back of the cockpit. "Where are you man?" she asked.

"No _ idea! Same alien planet as you, I guess, except, I don't actually know how long the range is on these radios. I don't think they're actually radios." _

"Yeah, I thought they were some kind of entanglement-based communicator." Pidge reached the door and started prying. Thankfully, her suit still worked, which meant the strength multipliers did too. "But we're not getting any responses from the others."

_ "Altean space magic." _

"Magic is just sufficiently advanced technology, Hunk," Pidge said, smiling a little. They'd had this conversation at least half a dozen times, over the last couple months.

_ "Well, I'd say Altea was 'sufficiently advanced,' so yeah, magic." _ Hunk was grinning, she could hear it. 

Pidge grunted, as she hauled the doors open.  _ "You doing okay?"  _ Hunk asked.

"My Lion's offline." Pidge rounded the corner, making her way up to the exit hatches. "Physically, I'm fine."

_ "Good. Well, sorta good. Mine's down too. Think it was the wormhole, or the Galra energy, or just the crash? Wait, you crashed too, right?" _

"Maybe all three." Pidge reached the door at the back of the Lion's mouth. There was no edge to grab here. She reached down to her hip, and pulled her Bayard into her hand. "Either way, we'll have fix them."

_ "Do we know how to do that?" _

Pidge grimaced, flicking the bayard into its energy-blade form. "Not really."

_ "Okay. Well, if anyone's going to figure out how to repair two ancient robot space lions, it's gonna be the two of us, right?" _

Pidge set her blade against the metal. "Yup." She slashed a quick square into the center of the door and aimed a kick at the center. She was a little surprised when it worked, but then her Bayard had proven  _ really  _ good at cutting things. Even better than Kieth's sword. She climbed through the gap, careful not to brush against the hot metal edges. Her suit could probably take it, but it was best not to test these things outside of a lab. "You managed to get out of your lion yet? We should try and figure out where we are, relative to each other. Look for landmarks."

_ "I was building a camp outside when you called. I had my helmet off, or I would have answered right away. The air here is… weird." _

Pidge stopped. There was one more door between her and the outside, the other end of the mouth airlock. "Define 'weird,' Hunk."

_ "It's got a taste to it? The helmet said it was breathable, but  the air itself tastes  _ sweet. _ " _

"Huh." Pidge frowned. "Some kind of pollen?"

_ "Maybe. There are plants here. Some stuff that looks like fruit. I'm trying to make a stew with the food processor from my Lion." _

Pidge frowned. It was definitely weird, and she was definitely keeping her helmet closed until she had some idea what was going on, but having Hunk describe all this over the radio wasn't making the best use of her time. "Hang on buddy," she said, setting her Bayard against the last door. "I'm going to do a little recon. Sit tight?"

_ "Okay, yeah." _

"And don't eat anything without having the food processor scan it," she added.

Hunk _scoffed._ _"Right, yeah, like I'm gonna be stupid enough to… okay."_

Pidge smiled, and cut her way out of her lion.

She stepped out. Stopping just inches from the edge of the sleeve that covered the airlock door. A dull evening light streamed in through one of the gaps at the back of the lion's jaw. Outside, Pidge could see churned-up dirt, probably made that way by the crash. She frowned, and crouched, taking a look at the interior of the Lion's mouth.

The cannon, the support structures… she could make her way back up here, when she had to.

She stood, suddenly thankful for the lack of wind inside the mouth. She hopped off and kicked her jets, angling for the Lion's upper molars. Or, whatever kind of teeth a lion had in place of molars. Lion anatomy. Not something she'd particularly studied.

If Earth!lion anatomy even applied to Altean!lions. Were they the same species? Unlikely, but there were other similarities between Alteans and humans that seemed beyond coincidence. Galra too, for that matter.

Pidge smiled, bracing her legs and hitting the "molars" a little harder than she'd intended at the start of the jump, tucking into a crouch with the hit. Questions for later.

She looked out over the landscape, and her brain rapidly switched gears.

"Hunk?" she said, into her microphone. "Do you see any signs of civilization where you landed?"

Hunk responded a moment later.  _ "Not anything obvious. Why?" _

Pidge looked up at the unmistakable silhouette of an Altean castle. "Because I just did."

**Author's Note:**

> I did not actually mean to post this! I was messing with the formatting and stuff and clicked "post without preview" instead of "preview." Oops.
> 
> Well, c'est la vie.


End file.
